This flippant antithesis, which, from its sparkling ambiguity, might itself be quoted as a specimen of sheer "tinsel" (_clinquant_), amounts to no more than that there are "fools," as the satirist calls them, who prefer what is _false_ in Tasso to what is _true_ in Virgil; but that the whole, the half, or even a tenth of the "Gerusalemme Liberata," of which he himself speaks elsewhere with sufficient commendation, is composed of "_clinquant_," without a greatly overbalancing weight of gold even in its worst parts, he has not dared to affirm, though by a pitiful insinuation, not less unworthy of the author than unjust to the object, he has had the left-handed luck to fix a stigma to that effect upon the fair fame of one, in comparison with whose magnificent creations of thought his own finely elaborated productions are but as "French wire" to "solid bullion." The feeble confirmation of Boileau's equivocal sentence, by the elegant but prejudiced Addison, is of little weight. The critic, who, in tracing Milton's obligations to some of his great forerunners, acknowledges that among these he might have included Tasso, but that he does not deem him "a sufficient voucher," could be but very imperfectly acquainted with the authority which he affected to disparage, but which the poet of "Paradise Lost" held in very different estimation. Try Boileau, when he attempts a strain of heroics, as in the "Ode on the taking of Namur," or Addison, in his celebrated "Campaign," by any page that may be first opened in all Tasso's multifarious compositions in verse, and the "white plume" on the crest of Louis XIV., which the court poet mistook for a star, and the destroying "angel," which the court critics of queen Anne's reign hailed as descending from "the highest heaven of invention," and the feather metamorphosis, in the first instance, will be pronounced a puerile and pedantic conceit; and the "angel," in the second, a piece of commonplace machinery, which scarcely escapes the charge of profaneness in its main attribute. Marlborough, a mortal man, burning to avenge his country's wrongs, may well be imagined as slaughtering, with terrible delight, the thousands and tens of thousands of her enemies; but that an angel should be "pleased" (as the cold and heartless phrase is) in executing judgments upon unresisting victims of divine wrath (righteous as the vengeance may be) is utterly inconceivable; nor can the poet shelter himself under the doubtful interpretation of the context,-- "Pleased _the Almighty's orders to perform_, Rides on the whirlwind and directs the storm,"--